Tunneling LDP LSPs in RSVP LSPs Overview
If you are using RSVP for traffic engineering, you can run LDP simultaneously to eliminate the distribution of external routes in the core. The LSPs established by LDP are tunneled through the LSPs established by RSVP. LDP effectively treats the traffic-engineered LSPs as single hops.
When you configure the router to run LDP across RSVP-established LSPs, LDP automatically establishes sessions with the router at the other end of the LSP. LDP control packets are routed hop-by-hop, rather than carried through the LSP. This routing allows you to use simplex (one-way) traffic-engineered LSPs. Traffic in the opposite direction flows through LDP-established LSPs that follow unicast routing rather than through traffic-engineered tunnels.
If you configure LDP over RSVP LSPs, you can still configure multiple OSPF areas and IS-IS levels in the traffic engineered core and in the surrounding LDP cloud.